The Things We Do For Love

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Over the next months, she found them a new flat, a top floor with three rooms overlooking the graceful dome of a church which pleased her whenever she caught sight of it through the window. She painted the apartment herself in a pale yellow which trapped the sunshine; furnished it with whatever pretty bits and pieces she could find - a porcelain bowl, an ironwork table with delicate deco lines. The prize was an old piano on which they sometimes played duets as they had in the old days when he was her tutor.

  Everything was scarce. But she didn’t mind and while she worked or scoured the city, she thought about the changes in Staszek.

  There were many, but she was only gradually able to piece them together. First what she called to herself his ‘lost time’ had to become clearer to her. He never talked about those months directly - he didn’t want memory toppling this bridge to the future - but they emerged for her in oblique comments, bits of stories abruptly curtailed, and in those nightmares which occasionally dreamt him, so that he shouted in his sleep and woke up crying.

  His last expedition had somehow overshot the mark and landed him in Poland, rather than Slovakia where he had instructions to meet up with the resistance. He had been picked up and arrested. He wasn’t in uniform, so there was no question of POW treatment, even if that would have made a difference. He had been sent to a prison camp, done harsh, gruelling, pointless labour, watched disease, exhaustion, starvation, decimate the older inmates. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

  The worst of it was what he could see on the other side of the barbed wire, could hear, could smell - the murder of the innocent which he was helpless to impede. He was young, strong, able, an officer in his country’s military, yet he was utterly impotent. It was that impotence which weighed on him and with it came a kind of shame, a guilt not unlike her mother had suffered. Though his sacrifice was different.

  For Staszek that guilt could only be kept at bay and transformed by a life dedicated to the common good. On his own, he told her time and again, for this was something he would talk about, the individual was helpless. You couldn’t shout ‘it is my right to be free’ in a concentration camp and find freedom thrust upon you. No, freedom was not a gift; it had to be worked for communally. Earned. Before the war, they had assumed it as a right and it had been frittered away. They must never allow this to happen again. A common front was essential to ensure lasting peace and social reconstruction.

  Later, when she was wiser and it was already too late, she realised that Staszek’s experience of war had put the psychological seal on what had been a youthful set of idealistic dicta. Back then his communism had been a critical and intellectual stance towards the wrongs of his world. Now he needed communism, because only a martyrdom in the service of a future and greater good could assuage guilt. And silence the dead who had given their lives for him.

  He was not alone, though he was the best of his kind.

  Sometimes, for months on end, Simone could share his zeal for the future. Sometimes she couldn’t. She had waited for him for so long that somehow he was future enough. She wanted this present with him, not its glorified postponement. Building a world in which there would never again be national or racial or class oppression, where tolerance and equality prevailed was one thing. She could believe in that. Blinding oneself to the chicanery or pettiness or greed of acquaintances, simply because they were party members or working class, was another. Not, she realised, that Staszek blinded himself willfully. He simply couldn’t see, in the same way that he couldn’t see the flowers she brought home with such delight.

  Fixed on the horizon, his eyes didn’t focus on the daisies or the cowpats at his feet.

  Simone saw both with great distinctness. The scepticism her father had so ingrained in her didn’t help. She was always arguing this side and that side and maybe and perhaps until Staszek lost patience with her and took out the work he had brought home with him, concentrating on it with such intensity that there was no budging him.

  As she watched him, not only at home, but at restaurants and gatherings, she increasingly worried for him. It seemed to her that his very innocence, his very idealism, acted as a reproach, a potential threat to those whose hands were mired in past crimes or in opportunistic greed.

  Meanwhile they worked hard and after three or four or perhaps it was six months when the surprise of their skins next to one another had worn off, made love less and less. Staszek was promoted to head of his section at the Ministry. He often came home late, exhausted by the shifts and roundabouts of a foreign policy which, though nominally independent, always had first to pay heed to Soviet plans.

  She would see him struggling to put the latest Soviet intervention in a good light and not always quite managing to. Though he might admire what had taken place there, his idea of communism had never included a bowing to Soviet will. Now, as the Russians prevented the Czechs from accepting the American Marshall Plan which would have so greatly helped to restructure the economy, she could feel him bowing, trying to put a gloss on things, murmuring about how others knew better than him, half believing it. He looked so pale in those weeks, she couldn’t bring herself to argue with him.

  Late in August she went to Paris to visit her father. She returned laden with presents, shirts and socks, tins of pâté and crab meat, a bottle of Grand Marnier, books and her old violin.

  As she unpacked and brought out delight after delight, Staszek hovered over her. He seemed nervous.

  ‘Why have you brought all this? For whom is it all?’

  ‘Idiot,’ she danced towards him, held out a shirt to his chest. ‘It’s for you. For us. It’s almost our anniversary. The unofficial one.’ She kissed him playfully.

  They had got married in December, so unostentatiously it felt like the after-thought it was, though she was pleased he had wanted to, doubly pleased at the weekend in the mountains. Yet she thought of the real moment to celebrate as the one when they had first met again.

  ‘You know I can’t wear any of this,’ he said tensely.

  ‘Why ever not?’ She refused to give up her playfulness. ‘The blue is perfect for you.’

  He tore the shirt from her hands and thrust it on the bed. ‘I can’t be seen in all these foreign goods. They’re bourgeois. They’re…’

  She stepped back as if he had hit her. ‘Like your French wife,’ she finished for him. ‘Nothing has really changed, has it? Before the war you couldn’t be seen with me because I was French, a signatory to the Munich Agreement. And now it’s just the same.’ She pushed him out of the room, fumed, shouted after him as she slammed the door, ‘Was it worth all those dead, I wonder?’

  Later, when the clock in the hall had already struck midnight, he lay down beside her. He was apologetic, tender, sad, shamed and she cried silent tears as he came into her. But he never wore the shirts. She took to using them as nighties. Whenever she had one on he would laugh. And he always made love to her on those nights. She was pleased about that, she didn’t quite know why. It was as if the shirts were some kind of transgression. And they were both secretly delighted that he still had the ability to transgress.

  At the beginning of March, just after the elections of ‘48 had brought the Communists to power, Franci said to her,’ I’m leaving, you know. My boyfriend thinks it’s not a good idea to be working for an Embassy now.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘No.’ She lowered her voice, pointed towards the castle. ‘They don’t like it up there, he says. They don’t like us mingling with Westerners. We might pick up bad habits.’ She made one of her silly faces. ‘Like friendship.’ She laughed.

  The conversation upset her almost as much as the suicide of the head of Staszek’s ministry - though there were dark rumours that it wasn’t suicide, that he had been assisted to the Ministry window by two men in grey suits who didn’t believe that the free-thinking son of the first Czech President had the right profile for the new government.

  A distraught Staszek told her that Masaryk had long been depressed,
that it was an illness with him. But she could feel his uncertainty. A few weeks later, when he came home from work looking particularly fraught, she said to him, ‘You know, I’ve been thinking. What if we went to live in Paris for a change. My father’s getting frail. He’s all alone in that big house. And…’

  ‘No.’ He cut her off before she had a chance to elaborate on the picture. He didn’t meet her eyes. ‘My place is here. There’s so much to be done. I’m needed.’

  Shortly after that he was promoted. He told her about it with a touch of pride and also a hesitation. He didn’t know whether he was equal to the task - and it would mean even more work. But the job would bring with it a bigger flat, if they wanted one. He stroked her hair softly, ‘Perhaps we’ll have a child soon.’

  There had been no sign of a child, though there had latterly been none of those precautions her mother had once been so worried about. She wondered about that, wondered whether there was something wrong with her. But she put the thought out of her mind, consoling herself with the notion that perhaps one really had to want a child to have one. And she wasn’t sure she did, though for Staszek’s sake she wished it. She reflected, that for all their occasional disagreements, she loved him so much that she couldn’t imagine life without him.

  Yet increasingly she loved him only when they were alone. When protocol forced her to accompany him to gatherings, she could hear the women’s voices around her, lowered in malice, like the sibilant and envious tones of a Paris concierge, pointing to her foreignness, her lack of working class credentials, her mother’s necklaces. And she could never say the right thing. She was always being rebuked for her comments, criticized. She complained of this to Staszek.

  ‘Don’t be so sensitive,’ he admonished her. ‘They’re simple women. They still have things to learn. But there are things we could learn from them, as well.’

  ‘What things?’ Simone challenged. ‘Taste? Greed? Have you seen the way they deck themselves out. Like overblown circus performers. And their apartments? Stuffed with furniture that’s obviously been nicked from others. Just because you put a category on something - working class - doesn’t make all its individuals perfect, you know.’

  He paid no attention. He was caught up with events, the blockade of Berlin, the shifting Soviet attitude to Yugoslavia, a growing hostility between East and West. The day to day run of ordinary life was irrelevant in comparison.

  ‘Melnik. We are here.’ The taxi driver pulled the car to a halt in a sleepy baroque square, a fountain at its centre. ‘The castle is that way.’ He directed a stubby finger towards a steep incline. ‘Want me to walk with you? It’s open for tours.’

  Simone looked at him from glazed eyes. ‘No. No,’ she said too sharply, then collecting herself suggested that he might take himself off to lunch. She didn’t know quite how long she would be.

  A jabbing cold met her as she slid from the overheated car. It forced her into wakefulness. Ahead of her, up the escarpment was a church tower topped with an onion shaped cupola. She stared at it for a moment, then turned abruptly and walked in the opposite direction.

  Light snow had begun to fall, skirmishing flurries which dampened her cheeks and bit at her eyes. At the fountain, she paused to adjust her collar and glance at the stone figure of a stout peasant woman bearing grapes. Their surface was whitened by snow. From across the square in front of a building with a warm yellow facade, a child shouted, was stilled by her mother who carried a string bag, heavy with vegetables. An old lorry shuddered past. Then, quiet - that small town quiet of ancient buildings and ordered lives.

  The streets looked innocent, Simone thought. Too innocent. She turned a corner and, as if her reflection had been noted, all but collided with a tank. A lumbering, immobilized tank, its sides corroded, but its red star still vibrant. Odd that. She had assumed all traces of the Soviet past would have been eradicated. But no. This tank was still here, a monument, the plaque firmly stated, to the liberating Russian soldiers of 1945.

  With a shiver, Simone retraced her steps and headed slowly uphill, in the direction of church and castle. She forced her feet and her thoughts where they didn’t want to go.

  In August of 1948, Staszek had taken her on a brief holiday to the spa at Karlovy Vary. They stayed in the opulence of the Grand Hotel Pupp. The waters tasted foul. Nor did she like the medicinal Becherovka which was supposed to wash away the flavour, but she sampled both as often as Staszek insisted, and giggled when the look on his face echoed hers. They were happy and for once Staszek seemed relaxed. They behaved like children, walking gaily hand in hand down the regal promenade or scurrying noisily up the hillside, ice-cream melting on their faces, their smiles wide, as innocent as if the war had never happened.

  On their second to last day, Staszek told her he needed to work for a few hours and urged her to take the waters without him. She ambled down to the great hall, sipped a little of the liquid and then made her way through the lobby. The day was glorious, begging to be walked in, the hills behind the hotel particularly fragrant.

  She had made her way half way up the incline when a blonde woman of Walkyrie proportions emerged from the shadow of a tree and greeted her. Karolina Dostolova. A friend of Staszek’s from way back. She had met her once before the war. It was at the small party her parents had given when she and her mother were leaving Prague. Staszek had brought her and Simone, in the throes of her still secret love, had loathed her on sight. Latterly, she had bumped into her now and again at official gatherings. Karolina had risen in the Communist Party hierarchy and Simone preferred to stay out of her way. But she returned her greeting pleasantly enough.

  ‘Fine weather.’ The woman said it as if it might be an infringement of celestial duty.

  ‘Mmmn. But the waters are foul, aren’t they?’

  ‘Are they? No matter. I have no time for small talk, as you must know. I’ve come to give you some advice.’ The woman’s face was sternly impassive. She didn’t meet Simone’s eyes.

  ‘What advice can you possibly give me?’ Alert now to the fact that this meeting wasn’t an accident, that the woman had been lying in wait for her, Simone was tempted to make her dislike evident.

  ‘I’m worried for Staszek. You know he and I have been comrades for many years.’

  ‘I don’t really see what business Staszek is of yours.’ Simone quickened her pace and turned off the path in an attempt to lose her. But the woman was put off neither by her coldness nor her disinterest. She matched her steps to Simone’s strides.

  ‘At this stage of our work, he really can’t afford to have an inveterate bourgeoise beside him. You receive too many letters from abroad. The letters you send home carry too many complaints. Then, there are your contacts with your Embassy…’

  Simone blanched. She had the vertiginous realisation that she had been spied on for months.

  ‘The Party needs complete loyalty from its members. Without you, Staszek will rise high.’

  Simone turned on her. ‘You call this advice? I’d call it a threat. A low and offensive threat.’

  The woman shrugged. Beneath the veneer of politeness, she was implacable. ‘I have shielded him for months now, ensured his promotion. But he should never have married you. It was a madness. It was because you pressured him. You must know that it was only because of your pressure. You should return to France. Yes, it would be best if you went back to France.’

  ‘You have no right…’ Simone began to splutter. ‘No right to speak to me like this.’

  ‘If you thought for a moment, you would see that I have every right. Indeed, a duty.’ The withering look she turned on Simone made her feel she had been transformed into a sub species of vermin. ‘My rights were very well established even before you showed your face in our country. Think about it. But don’t think too long. That would be unwise.’

  Without a goodbye, she strode off into the woods.

  Simone stared after her and then feeling her legs grow weak, sank onto a stretch of grass. Pa
in catapulted through her, tearing at the foundations of her existence. Karolina and Staszek. Of course. She should have guessed.

  She didn’t say anything to Staszek immediately. She felt concussed, a sleep-walker grappling amongst shadows. Only on the drive back to Prague, did the words tumble out. She tried to make them light, easy. ‘I bumped into Karolina Dostolova in Karlovy Vary. Did I tell you?’

  She watched the muscle work in his cheek, the sudden shift in the car’s speed. ‘Oh? Was she well?’ His voice betrayed nothing.

  Simone didn’t speak.

  ‘I didn’t know she was taking a holiday.’ He flashed her a look, a pleasant smile, reached for her hand.

  It was the touch that had made her burst out. ‘She told me she had been your lover. Your lover for years.’

  The car lurched abruptly. After a moment, he pulled off to the side of the road, turned to her, murmured her name. ‘You don’t understand, Simone.’

  ‘I understand too well. I am not a child.’ She had stared out on sun-bleached fields and refused his eyes.

  ‘Karolina and I… Before I even met you…’

  ‘You don’t deny it.’ Her voice had a bitterness she didn’t know was in her.

  ‘It’s not like you think. She… Of late, it was only to protect you.’

  Simone cut him off. ‘I don’t want to know.’

  They had driven back to Prague in silence. At the apartment, the snooping concierge, who doubled as a local youth group leader, handed Simone a telegram which had patently already been opened. For some reason, this released the tears she had held back. She rushed up the stairs and locked herself in the bathroom. She wouldn’t come out, despite Staszek’s pleading. Instead, she stared at the telegram urging her home to her father who had been taken ill. And she wept. The tears wouldn’t stop. At last, when the stillness of sleep had descended on the apartment, she emerged to curl up on the sofa alone.